Orbital Motion

I woke up today with a fever, raw throat, runny nose, and a little weight-cloud hovering around my chest. I know that feeling, and always pay attention when it arises. I had asthma as a kid, usually as a result of being around cats or horses, but sometimes for no reason at all according to the grownups around me. Which is another way of saying sometimes stress would bring it on, and sometimes emotion would do that, particularly if I was crying hard or feeling angry - and neither my mom nor dad really allowed me to express intense emotion around them unless it was happiness. So if I was having trouble breathing without cats or horses in the vicinity, it was for “no reason.” 

Any emotion that impacted my breathing had the potential to draw my attention to my breathing, which I knew from past experience might become restricted. And the fear of that restriction could, as you might guess, cause more anxiety, and then I’d be struggling to breathe. Struggling to breathe is a terrible feeling if you haven’t experienced it. Imagine for a weird moment if you would, your lungs as a tornado inside your chest made of sadness, fear, grief, rage, despair and confusion - and the only room to breathe is down the center of all that motion. And no matter how hard you try, you can tell you aren’t getting enough oxygen, and the more you panic, the less room there is for your breath. 

Anyway, weird moment over, but hopefully you get the idea. As a kid it was scary, and it’s probably at least one reason why I was drawn toward yoga eventually. You find the tools to calm your nervous system, and the entire practice is based on breathing deeply, and paying attention to the fact that you’re breathing deeply. If you’re paying attention to that, your mind isn’t dragging you into the past, and it isn’t future-tripping, it’s just focused on something that is happening in the present moment. And it’s a relief, especially for someone like me who used to spend a lot of time replaying conversations or events wishing I could go back and rewrite them, or worrying about things that might happen in the future, or beating the crap out of myself for mistakes big or small, or second-guessing myself constantly. 

Did you know cat allergies don’t tend to show up until kids are about two? I didn’t. That’s me with Bosco.

I also used to get sick a lot growing up. No question, sustained stress is tough on the immune system, and trying to keep your mother happy so she won’t drink and might extend some love in your direction, and trying to keep your dad together because he can’t keep his dick in his pants is a lot of stress for any kid. Also, my mom would be nice to me when I was sick - that was the one time I could count on that. She’d make alphabet soup, and let me watch tv under a blanket on the couch. Sometimes she’d even put her cool hand on my forehead, which is about as demonstrative as she got with me. She’d call my school and say I’d be out sick for the day, and she’d sometimes call to check on me from work. 

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

The illnesses were real, I wasn’t holding the thermometer up to my bedside lamp like kids in those movies from the 80’s. I was a kid who got strep throat and bronchitis every year, and I’ve had pneumonia three times in my life. Also H191 the weekend I turned forty, and Covid, twice. Funny thing, one of the times I had pneumonia the doctor had me blow in that contraption to make the balls float up? And he asked me if I was a professional athlete because he said I had the lungs of an Olympic swimmer, which was surprising to him because I also had a lot of scarring on my lungs from the asthma. Which leads me to believe that it’s a good thing if you spend decades focused on breathing deeply. You heal more than your lungs. 

I don’t get asthma anymore, even if I’m around cats or horses. Partly it’s because I rarely put myself in the position of being in an enclosed space with a cat, even though I like them, and if I go horseback riding (which I do wholeheartedly if the opportunity presents itself) I’m fine outside. I used to take riding lessons at Claremont Stables in New York City as a kid, and I really don’t know how anyone allowed me to keep doing that, because I’d come home looking like I’d been in the ring with Apollo Creed, not a horse. Eyes swollen almost-shut, hives everywhere, tough time breathing. But I wouldn’t panic if it happened because of animals. It was expected and I’d take medication. It was when it came on out of nowhere that I found it scary, especially because I was told there wasn’t a reason. There are enough scary things in the world when you’re a kid without having to worry about whether you’ll be able to breathe. Nonetheless, there’s no way I should have been in a riding stable in NYC. There’s no way a lot of things should have happened, though. 

Photo by Daniel Bonilla on Unsplash

I also used to grind my teeth. I’d grind them so loudly, sometimes I’d wake my mom up in the next room and she’d tell me about it in the morning. At my dad’s first apartment there were two lofts in a wide open space, and sometimes at night he’d climb up the ladder of my loft and shake my foot to make me stop. I remember my dentist telling my mom my teeth were more U-shaped than they should be as a result. I had a mouthguard for a while, but I hated it so I stopped wearing it.

Today, if you had a little kid who had asthma when she got upset, or who was grinding her teeth loudly at night, you’d probably be trying to figure out what was going on. You’d wonder about anxiety, at least as one possible cause. But this was the seventies, and my parents were caught up in their own lives. The well from which Gen X hath sprung forth. My job was to be good. To do well in school. To speak when spoken to, and to do what I was told. To be helpful, kind, obedient. To be easy, basically. I got the memo, but if you have a lot of unexpressed emotion, it’s going to come out somewhere, some way. The migraines started when I hit puberty. The disordered eating, too. The perfectionism and accompanying self-loathing were already ingrained by then.

I rarely get sick these days, Covid notwithstanding. I take good care of myself, move my body in lots of different ways, and eat well. I also get enraged when I need to (which is often, currently, for reasons you all know if you read my stuff - or are alive right now in this insane world), let myself grieve, know how to handle anxiety, and don’t let things fester. I had to work on all that, it’s not like it happened magically, but it sure is an easier way to live. I’m not surprised I woke up sick today - I’ve been on two planes in the last week, inside two airports, and multiple subway cars. Also, I dropped my son off at college last Sunday, and buried my mother’s ashes last Thursday. To say it’s been emotional is putting it mildly.

My son is a big personality - he’s funny and kind and affectionate. You don’t miss it if he walks into a room, and you feel it when he doesn’t. It’s strange to be in the house without him. It feels odd to walk by his room where his bed is made and everything looks exactly as it did the last time I walked by - and as it will look later - unless I go in there and sit at his desk and move some things around, which I’ve done once or twice. We’re texting a lot and we’ve FaceTimed and he’s doing well which makes it all relatively okay. Growing pains are normal. I miss him like crazy, and I’m learning to live with that, just like I’ve learned to live with the constant ache in my heart for my mom. For the first year after she died, I can’t tell you how many times I’d be in my car, driving somewhere after dropping my kids off, and would go to call her, only to have the horrible realization that I couldn’t. Re-remembering is a certain kind of pain that lives in that liminal space between sleeping and waking, knowing and not knowing, and then knowing again.

I’ve gotten used to loss, and I think that’s the part we ought to talk about more when we talk about the middle years (which sounds so much more poetic to my ear than middle age, which makes me think instantly of a sad man with a paunch, sitting on the couch, or the seventy-year-old women they put on the cover of the AARP magazines, not that they aren’t beautiful, but they aren’t fifty-five. And no one retires at 55 anymore, anyway, but I digress. And apparently those seventy-something women exist to watch their grandchildren, but dammit, I digress again. I’m done now, really). Loss is so intertwined with everything else, with the joy of watching your children grow more fully into the people they’re going to be as they head out into the world, or the way you know yourself and spend less time worrying about what anyone thinks and more time living your life, or the way you say the things that need to be said because you don’t take tomorrow as a given, or the way you may not know what the next chapters look like for you, or even what you want them to look like. It’s as thrilling as it is heartbreaking as it is fragile. And it’s all kind of beautiful. I guess it takes half your life to make friends with uncertainty.

I can’t speak for everyone - I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I find that I’ve grown softer. I don’t grip the way I did when I was in my twenties and thirties. I don’t expect life to give me exactly what I want just because I’ve tried my hardest and done everything I could to make things go the way I want them to go. I understand that everything can change on a dime, that what seems solid is just a mass of atoms that could disperse into the ether, that I’m on a planet that’s suspended and spinning because of gravity and the sun and orbital motion, and that really, the best thing I can do is love my heart out every day because that’s all we’ve ever got. And somehow, mixed into all that realization is a concurrent amount of compassion and forgiveness because who could ever argue any of this is easy?

As much as I rage, I rage for my daughter and for my son because when I leave this earth - when I disperse into the ether - I want to leave them (I’ll never want to leave them) on a planet that is sane and full of love. So that when they go for the phone and realize they can’t call me, they can still feel me in the sunshine, in the trees, in a bird flying by. And I don’t need to be weighed down by grudges or sad stories about things that happened when I was a kid and even breathing felt hard. 

“I will pass someone trying to destroy a bridge. I might try to stop him or I might realize that he is doing it because he has no one waiting for him on the other side, and this is his way of trying to fend off his own loneliness.”

Manuscript Found in Accra, Paulo Coelho

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about unexpressed emotion (for girls and women, rage is a big one) and the way it impacts your health and wellbeing, along with the relief that comes with holding things loosely - even those you love most in this world - I’ll be here 10/4/24 at 11:15am PST or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. As ever, I’m so grateful for your comments and re-stacks and enthusiasm. So happy to be in orbital motion with you.